"Jewish speakers of Old French or Old Italian who were literate in either liturgical Hebrew or Aramaic, or both, migrated through Southern Europe to settle in the Rhine Valley in an area known as Lotharingia (later known in Yiddish as Loter) extending over parts of Germany and France.[29] There, they encountered and were influenced by Jewish speakers of High German languages and several other German dialects"
The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
31–40 of 109 posts
Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
#32Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
It didn't exactly come out of nowhere, it was prefaced by "a fringe tends to develop; in Yiddish linguistics, that would be Paul Wexler". As an L2 german (standard & dialect) speaker who's learning a slavic language I think "fringe" may be the charitable way to put it. (I've experimented with alemannic dialect speakers and upon first exposure they tend to think of yiddish as a different german dialect with some bizar…
As a native Slavic speaker that can also speak an almost fluent Dutch, and knowing what the quoted Hobbit line says, I can't even see how this having anything to do with Slavic languages is even a discussion.
There is one word of Slavic origin in that paragraph: bridke (English ugly, Polish brzydki, German hässlich). (And I can't find a cognate for "dripendikn" in any other language.)
Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
#34I speak native English, fluent German and beginning Dutch. A few years ago I picked up a Yiddish primer. In my layman's eyes, Yiddish is indisputably a Germanic language. Learning it was like learning to read German backwards in Hebrew letters. I understand why Yiddish speakers would not want to believe Yiddish is Germanic. And yet...
Having grown up as an American Jew, it has been a recurring revelation of how much of what I think if as "Jewish" culture is actually German.
Or more likely Prussian, or some other pre-modern political identity. I had the chance to visit a museum outlining the history of the German region and it was a shock to me, even coming from a background as a student of ancient China, how many iterations of how many petty polities existed in this area. Mind boggling. My takeaway: the modern 'nation state' cultural notion is a poor ally in examining the history of the region of modern Germany and its surroundings prior to the 20th century. Shifting alliances of nominally independent city-states combined with evidence toward enthusiastic adoption of distributed printing and popular literacy could be argued to underpin some of the more positive ideals of the EU today, despite the negative interludes.
Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
#35I speak native English, fluent German and beginning Dutch. A few years ago I picked up a Yiddish primer. In my layman's eyes, Yiddish is indisputably a Germanic language. Learning it was like learning to read German backwards in Hebrew letters. I understand why Yiddish speakers would not want to believe Yiddish is Germanic. And yet...
As a speaker of Viennese German and English, I have no problem understanding spoken Yiddish.
I‘m a run-of-the-mill West German dude with no particular talent for languages, and second this. It’s somewhere between “normal” German and Dutch in terms of understandibility for me.
Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having grown up as an American Jew, it has been a recurring revelation of how much of what I think if as "Jewish" culture is actually German.
Would it be crazy to call Judaism in 1920s Germany basically like a German subculture of people who are ethnically German and speak a variation of the language? I’ve met so many other Jews (that fled Germany originally) that to me are basically German (even have German last names).
Ashkenazi Jews are not ethnically German. Genetic studies estimate them to be roughly 45% Levantine, 45% Southern European, and 10% Slavic. Germans are 100% North-Western European.
Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would it be crazy to call Judaism in 1920s Germany basically like a German subculture of people who are ethnically German and speak a variation of the language? I’ve met so many other Jews (that fled Germany originally) that to me are basically German (even have German last names).
Ashkenazi Jews are not ethnically German. Genetic studies estimate them to be roughly 45% Levantine, 45% Southern European, and 10% Slavic. Germans are 100% North-Western European.
I’ve met many, many Jews. To me visually, many (especially the stein, berg, etc) looked exactly like Germans.
Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
#38From my understanding, the Jewish European languages, including Yiddish and Ladino (judeo-spanish) have a short of frozen in time quality.
I know more about Ladino because I know Spanish and am always interested in romance languages. Many (though by no means all) of the differences between that and modern Castilian are that Ladino has not kept current with Spanish phonetic changes from the 1500s onwards. I believe I've also read Yiddish has a similar quality of seeming, from a distance, like it has some characteristics that might have been seen among German speaking gentiles in prior times.
I think that when you see separations of populations, you sometimes see the preservation of "archaic" language features.
Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ashkenazi Jews are not ethnically German. Genetic studies estimate them to be roughly 45% Levantine, 45% Southern European, and 10% Slavic. Germans are 100% North-Western European.
I’ve met many, many Jews. To me visually, many (especially the stein, berg, etc) looked exactly like Germans.
Well, your hypothesis is wrong. They are not related beyond a few percent at best.
Re: The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would it be crazy to call Judaism in 1920s Germany basically like a German subculture of people who are ethnically German and speak a variation of the language? I’ve met so many other Jews (that fled Germany originally) that to me are basically German (even have German last names).
Ashkenazi Jews are not ethnically German. Genetic studies estimate them to be roughly 45% Levantine, 45% Southern European, and 10% Slavic. Germans are 100% North-Western European.
Genetics are a poor proxy for ethnicity. There are many who would even refer to the use of blood quantum (e.g. 23-and-me) to determine ethnicity as a form of race (pseudo)science.